Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Club authors, team authors

Henrietta Szold
A young Henrietta Szold, at about the time she was a member of the WLCB.

Starting next week, members of the WLCB research team will be posting profiles of the various published authors who were members of the Club. We’ve been collecting their works and discovering that this was a pretty interesting group of women– more interesting, in fact, than the Club meeting minutes made them seem. While the minutes are fascinating in their own right, the varied and sometimes adventurous lives of the actual Club members made us realize that the Club’s desire to appear orderly and unified under the ideals of Southern womanhood imposed a staid– or at least studied– propriety on the entire group.

In this post, I actually want to celebrate the work of our own team members. Yesterday, the Maryland Historical Society published an article by Sydney on one Club member, “Miss Henrietta Szold: A Jewish Idealist in the WLCB.” Sydney encountered “Miss Szold” in the team’s work in the archives last summer. In her piece, she gives us a glimpse into her brief tenure into the Club in the early 1890s, and reflects on the importance of discovering her presence in the Club in the wake of racialized violence and anti-Semitism today.

And the publication of Sydney’s piece also gives me a chance to share with our new team members and followers of the blog the team’s first publication, which appeared last fall: Hunter’s evocative ruminations about the Club’s response– or lack of one– to one of the most momentous events in Baltimore history, the “Great Fire” of 1904.

Both of these essays were published in the Maryland Historical Society’s Underbelly blog, which claims to limn “the Deepest Corners of the Maryland Historical Society Library.” In future weeks and months, we’ll be seeking other ways to get our own works into print– here on this blog, on Wikipedia, in the book we will be publishing that will collect some of the Club members’ works, and who knows where else?

Posted on by Sydney Johnson · 2 Comments

Miss May Garrettson Evans

Last Friday, Hunter, Dr. Cole and I decided to make the trek to the Johns Hopkins University library in order to search the Baltimore Sun Historical Archive (which Loyola doesn’t have access to…) Both Hunter and I were assigned women in the Club to research that were some of the first female reporters for the Sun and we were very excited to see what we could find.

May Garretson Evans is accredited as being the first female reporter for the Baltimore Sun and there have been many articles written about her and her life. She has published two books about music and another book with her sister, Bessie Evans, about American Indian Dance Steps. I knew all of this going into the JHU library and was expecting to find an abundance of articles written by her. Unfortunately I was wrong.

I guess being the first female reporter in a rather large newspaper has its downsides. I was able to find one article stating Miss Evans as the writer. It was surprisingly about Edgar Allan Poe (these women are obsessed!) I believe that she wrote other stories or at least reported on other stories but because of her controversial employment was not given credit. In an article in the Sun written in 1947 she is quoted as saying,

My adventure into the newspaper field created a commotion. At first I was more interviewed then interviewing. I had to explain myself everywhere in that gaslight period. It was a perfect nuisance.

May Garretson Evans is just another example of some of the women in this Club that were venturing into territories previously unoccupied by women. Miss Evans along with Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin remind me that these women’s stories need to be told so they can get the recognition they deserve.  I hope that over the course of this semester I will be able to find more of Miss Evan’s writing so that she can received the credit that is due.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Women Writing (a LOT)

Over the past week, our assignment for our class has been to find publications from the women in the Club. I was assigned Maud Early, Marguerite Easter, May Evans and (my personal favorite) Christine Ladd Franklin.

I was able to find published works for all of these women, but the one who sparked the most interest for me was Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin who is exclusively referred to as Mrs. Fabian Franklin in the minutes.

Marina touched on Mrs. Franklin in her most recent post, which was fascinating for me to read after all of her work I was able to find. Mrs. Franklin was born in 1847 and went to Vassar College. She then went on to study at Johns Hopkins and was the first woman to have finished the requirements for a Ph.D in math and logic. Unfortunately, she was not given this title until much later in her life because of Johns Hopkins’ policy on coeducation at the time.

All of Mrs. Franklin’s publications are focused on her studies of math, logic and psychology. Her ideas about color vision were revolutionary in the field of psychology and mathematics. She has published over 50 articles in various magazines and journals. That being said, on her Wikipedia page, there are only eight publications listed. Hopefully by the end of the semester I will be able to update that to include all of her works that were published.

Another issue that I have with Mrs. Franklin is that all of her work is under the name of Christine Ladd Franklin. I have even seen Ladd and Franklin hyphenated because Franklin is her married name. Yet in the meetings, she is only referred to as Mrs. Fabian Franklin. We talked about this in class and have decided that the Club was very strict with their procedures as one of their mottos is “consistency, thou art a jewel.” So maybe the Club wasn’t necessarily trying to stifle Mrs. Franklin and her accomplishments so much as they were trying to keep control over the small things that mattered to them. These small things were sometimes all women had control over and so I don’t blame them…that much.

Posted on by Katie Shiber

The House Not Made with Hands

In transcribing minute meetings, it is easy to get lost in the technicalities of accurate replication, distracting one from content that seems, at times, mundane. However, in my transcription of the 805th Meeting of the Women’s Literary Club of Baltimore held on October 27th 1914, a sentiment was put forth that piqued my interest. The meeting was conducted by the committee on poetry, led by chairman Miss Lizette Woodworth Reese, who began by reading a poem entitled “Ghosts.” However, it was not Miss Reese that brought forth this reflection, but a musing from the secretary herself that caught my eye. She wrote, “Every house where men live and die is haunted. The house not made with hands is the one we really live in. This is the modern touch, taking the place of cruder apparitions of earlier times. Our ghosts have been turned inward.”

I was immediately struck because, unlike other minutes I had encountered, the minute keeper was not simply relaying the conversation of the group, but weighing in herself. She was so moved by the topic of ghosts and apparitions that she felt it necessary to document her thoughts. It is clear that the “house not made with hands” she is referring to is the kingdom of God, quoting from 2 Corinthians 5:1. It is a religious sentiment, but perhaps a social commentary too. These minutes were taken in October of 1914, shortly after the beginning of the first world war, a time in history when the world faced the grim reality of brutal intercontinental conflict, and Americans feared their nation’s entry into the war. Death was no longer a topic easily ignored, but one in the forefront of civilian minds. Perhaps the minute keeper’s words were just a belief that religion had taken precedent over old-fashioned superstition, but maybe she was instead struck by the reality that war was raging and death looming, finding solace in her divine belief in heaven.

Posted on by Sydney Johnson

Meeting the Members—Henrietta Szold.

Over the past weeks, I have been looking at the members of the Club—who they are, where the lived—and finally I am able to say what some of them look like.

With the help of the Maryland Historical Society and their Portrait Vertical File Collection,  I have been able to find some images of the women from this club. For this blog post I wanted to focus on one in particular, Henrietta Szold.

Miss Szold was a member of the Club from 1890-1894. The picture below was taken while she was still a member of the Club in 1893. Born in 1860 to Rabbi Benjamin Szold, Miss Szold was the only Jewish member of the club, making her, to our knowledge, one of the only—if not the only—member who was non-christian.

Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.
Miss Henrietta Szold. Image taken at the Maryland Historical Society.

Miss Szold’s wikipedia page (which I linked above) talks about her legacy as a Jewish Zionist and the founder of Hadassah, the Women’s Zionist Organization of America. It also talks about the many different roles she played in the Jewish community from Jewish education and being the first editor for the Jewish Publication Society. In 1933 Miss Szold emigrated to Palestine and was a part of Youth Aliyah, an organization that helped to rescue more then 30,000 Jewish children from Nazi Germany.

In 1945 Miss Szold passed away in one of the hospitals that she helped to found in Jerusalem. She is remembered around the world for the work that she did.

In the entire Wikipedia article about Miss Szold, it does not mention once that she was a member of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore. I think that because she was a member for such a short period of time, there was no mention of her membership. In general I think it is astounding that the ladies of the club let someone like Miss Szold in. These are women who have been known to hold discussions on why the Anglo-Saxon race is superior, as mentioned in Clara’s post. So the question must be posed, did Miss Szold leave once she realized the nature of the majority of the women in the Club, or was she asked to leave because of her religion?

Women like Miss Szold are few and far between in the Club, but it is important to try to find them and tell their story and also try to figure out their involvement in the Club. Miss Szold is remembered as a world renowned leader and activist but not as a member of the Woman’s Literary Club. We can only hope to bring recognition to the Club with the help of members such as Miss Szold.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

Taking names

As Sydney’s posts have documented, one of the challenges we’ve faced is the difficulty of finding even super-basic information– like, names–of the members of the Woman’s Literary Club of Baltimore.

Today, I happened to stumble upon a treasure trove of a document that had passed under the radar of our summer researchers. I was checking and verifying the names and addresses of the membership, which Sydney has painstakingly transcribed over about half of the summer. Names, we have all discovered, are very difficult to transcribe.

In the middle of a large, mostly empty, unlabeled book in the “Memberships” box of the WLCB, I ran across a few pages where the WLCB Constitution had been painstakingly copied, followed by an undated pledge signed by the membership.

Pledge
Pledge signed by officers, Board of Management, and members, probably 1898. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.

We’ve been trying to find some of these names for some time. Mrs. George K. McGaw (Margaret!). Mrs. R. K. Cautley (Lucy!). If we had realized how momentous this document was when we’d run our eyes across it earlier in the summer, we’d have saved ourselves a lot of work– many of the most active members of the Club, unsurprisingly, appear on this list.

Page 2 of signatures. MD Historical Society, MS988.vii.

I was able to date this document tentatively to the 1898-1899 season. Part of my logic was that Mrs. John C. Wrenshall (Letitia!) took over the presidency of the Club from Mrs. Lawrence Turnbull (Francese!). I also referred to the lists of officers and Board of Management that Sydney & Clara have compiled this summer– and while the signatories here most closely resemble those listed in the programs for 1898-1899, they don’t match exactly.

So, an answer raises more questions: how stable was the Board of Management in the Club? Did people switch in and out after being elected? But for now, I am very happy that we now have first names for about 15% of the Club.

It is one of the few “public” documents of the Club in which the women made a concerted effort to use their first names. Now that I’ve become more familiar with the documents, I’m seeing first names scattered about here and there, including in the title page of the membership dues book from 1890 (which lists Mrs. Christine Ladd Franklin as treasurer). They also sign their first names when elections are being held (They are the ones voting, after all, not their husbands!) Their first names also appear in the minutes, perhaps because those are more “private” documents.

On this pledge, there are only 2 or 3 instances where a signee has used her “married” name (Mrs. Thomas Hill), or used initials rather than writing out their full names. I find these hesitations both sad and touching.

If only they had written their names. With their names, we can start fleshing out their histories.

Posted on by Jean Lee Cole

An Obscurity among Obscurities: Miss Laura de Valin

One thing that has surprised me about the members of the WLCB is that so many were published authors. As I’ve been reviewing the transcription of the minutes taken by the indefatigable Lydia Crane, I’ve looked up members here and there to see what became of the works they read during the club meetings, to see if they had a life outside of the club.

Today I found an interesting connection between Club members’ writings and Hunter’s research on the Lutherville Female Seminary.

The minutes for April 10, 1900 relate that a Club member named Miss Laura de Valin read two of her poems, “In the Heyday,” and “A Sonnet.” A quick initial Google search for “Laura de Valin” uncovered this interesting document held in the Johns Hopkins University Library Special Collections, a piece of sheet music titled “A Parting Ode” written by Miss de Valin for the Lutherville Female Seminary in 1859!

The music has a frontispiece for the school which corresponds closely to the image Hunter included in his post.

parting ode
Front cover of “Parting Ode” by Laura de Valin, 1859.

I am leaping to the conclusion that this Laura de Valin is the same as the one who belonged to the WLCB because their names are so unusual– additional genealogical research would be necessary to confirm that this is true.

Assuming it is, then finding this sheet music tells us something about the age of Miss de Valin, and also links her with the Lutherville Female Seminary. Based on the amateurish quality of the verse, I would guess that de Valin may have been a student at the Seminary when she wrote this “ode,” which would make her about 60 years old at the time of the Club meeting where she read her poems.

That would mean that she would have been a young woman during the Civil War, which perhaps explains why she remained unmarried. Membership records show that she lived at 1214 Madison Ave., just a few blocks west of where I live now. She joined in 1899-1900, and left the club (or passed away) sometime before the 1904-1905 season. So her tenure in the club was brief.

Miss de Valin, I discovered, also was a playwright– a “Bibliography of Plays by Marylanders, 1870-1916” published in the Spring 1972 issue of the Maryland Historical Magazine lists two plays by a Laura V. de Valin: The Chaperon; A Comic Opera in Three Acts, from 1892, and Elisa, A Drama in Five Acts, from the same year.

In search of copies of the plays, I checked the MD Historical Society catalog (MDHS publishes the Maryland Historical Magazine, so I thought perhaps the bibliography of plays was based on manuscripts in their collection). I didn’t find the plays there, but I did find out that she edited a journal titled The New Pedagogue: A Monthly Journal Devoted to the Public School Interest of Baltimore, right around the time she belonged to the club. So that tells you that she was a teacher. Perhaps she was a teacher, rather than a student, at Luther Female Seminary. (Again, I am assuming that all of these Laura de Valins are the same person.)

It all makes you wonder: who was Laura V. de Valin? What kind of life did she lead? Did she crave a theatrical life, or was she committed to her work as a teacher? Did she live alone, or with family? What was she like? And what were her dreams?

Only further research will be able to answer these questions about this member of the Club–and we will probably never know about her dreams. But this little tidbit of information points to the ambition and wide-ranging intellect and interests of even the most obscure Club members.